Yesterday I got the opportunity to play around with a haptic device, which basically provides a force feedback / touch user interface to various 3D technologies. These included navigating a virtual world, and building 3D objects. I’ve written about it more over on eightbar, but it was so cool that I wanted to include the video over here as well.
Just to explain what is going on in the video, as it may not be entirely clear! The demos use a Novint Falcon gaming controller. To quote Anarkik, it is “like a small grounded ‘robot’ and provides the ‘force feedback’ that gives the uncanny sense of touching a virtual object. This device replaces the mouse and also provides more natural and coherent movement in 3 dimensions.” At the start, several of us have a go with the controller to drive an avatar around an OpenSim island running on the local machine, using Anarkik’s software. Around the middle of the video, we switch to using the Cre8 tool to do some simple modelling. In particular, we change the surface hardness of a sphere (where it becomes more or less soft to the touch); and then go inside the sphere and extrude the shape by pulling the controller around. Finally, there’s a brief look at some fabricated items modelled using the same software.
By the way, this was another clip edited with iMovie 09, which I’m increasingly impressed with – I need to do a screencast to show some of the nicer more advanced features that I’ve discovered!
We’ve had Sears and Circuit City as examples of what can be done with real world retail in virtual worlds for a while now. Essentially these stores attempt to replicate some of the real-life shopping environment, but with hyperlinks off to product pages on their website when a customer wants to know specifics about individual products. They have some other nice touches, too – check them out on IBM 10.
The IWOOT store takes the virtual world <-> real world retail connection one step further. You pick up a cart, and can then walk around looking at the billboards. Click on an item, and a package appears in the cart, labelled with an image of the item you just added to it. This is synced up with the I Want One Of Those website, so it’s actually adding items to your shopping cart there too.
Oh, and if you go away from the virtual store and come back tomorrow, the cart is persistent and remembers what you’d already added, so when it rezzes a second time, the same items will still be there.
What’s the benefit? Surely all we did there was to go another step towards replicating a real world experience. Why bother?
Well, it’s a step up from a 2D web page for online shopping, and here’s why:
It’s a social experience, more like really walking into a store. Jazzy was on the other side of the planet, but I was able to hop on the side of the virtual cart and look around the store at the same time.
I was able to comment on the items in the trolley. You can’t do that on a website, as you don’t know who is already looking at the page, or what they have in their cart. You can do that in the real world. Apparently this is how supermarket singles nights are supposed to work, but obviously I wouldn’t know about that…
IWOOT doesn’t currently have one, but they could mix in a live adviser. Although some websites have a “chat to a customer service representative online now” option, most do not.
It would also be possible to mix in some of the special touches that Circuit City or Sears do have, like the couch that gets repositioned according to the size of the TV.
Is it better than a real world store? Well, maybe not. Could I have been in a real store with someone and also on the other side of the planet from them? Definitely not. But here, all the usual arguments for online shopping apply – you can stay at home, have stuff delivered, but also get the social aspect of being with friends and visual feedback. There are a range of other ways to get value from a virtual world – Jasmin Tragas describes some of them in a great recent post.
I found IWOOT to be an interesting new way of looking at online retail. It’s a well-executed store. Check it out.
(sorry about the screencaps. I forgot I had SL set to capture with the UI included… by the way, lighting effects by RenderGlow…)
I spent the early part of this week at an internal conference. Part of my role was as a speaker: I gave a talk on Social Software (unfortunately some of the slides are confidential, or I’d put it on Slideshare). The other thing I was involved in was working with Roo to demonstrate some of the virtual worlds technologies that we have been looking at in IBM for the past 18 months.
For my part, I spent most of my time showing some of the IBM areas in Second Life, before handing people across to Roo to look at the other technologies.
One of the interesting aspects of how virtual worlds have been used lately is as backchannels to, or extensions of, various events and conferences. For example, the keynotes from Lotusphere, IMPACT, the Rational Software Development Conference and others have all been broadcast into Second Life. I attended several of them, and found it interesting how people were able to both watch and listen to the video streams, and socialise and comment on the talks at the same time.
There’s another event coming up next week. Here’s the announcement:
IBM Innovation Ecosystems conference – Second Life
From Monday 30th July to Wednesday 1st August, IBM will host a Real Life conference on “Innovation Ecosystems”. Accompanying this conference will be a Virtual Conference simulcast, at the IBM Second Life Business Center.
Drop into the IBM Business Center to watch presentations from the conference, to wander through the poster display area, or just to have a coffee and talk to some of IBM’s Distinguished Engineers.
How do I know about this one? Well, during the demonstrations this week, I was showing some of my colleagues in the real world some of our private sandboxes in SL. Whilst online, I bumped into someone from the US who was building a new prototype office space… and shortly afterwards one of my mentees came online, so I teleported her over. So there we were, having a three-way, cross-geo meeting and conversation… during which it emerged that the Innovation Ecosystems event is happening next week.
It was a great demonstration of how the technology can be used. That kind of casual, ad-hoc gathering would never have happened by phone or web conference.
I took part in the Dogear Nation podcast last Friday, alongside my fellow IBMers and regular show hosts Michael Rowe, Michael Martine and Matt Simpson.
It was an excellent experience – really good fun to talk to these guys – just chatting about up-to-the minute links, hacks and mashups. The initial reason that I got involved was to talk about Slorpedo! from HackDay, but we managed to cover a whole range of subjects including the new Google Maps features[1], Second Life in Real Life, Internet time, Wimbledon and Veodia, and all kinds of other stuff.
Sounds like I managed to overuse the word “neat” and umm and err too much, but overall I think it worked well. Apart from the massive ummming session around 16 minutes in when I completely forgot the words, for which I apologise.
This was actually my second podcast – the first one was an interview I did for our intranet recently. Who knows, there might be something in this podcasting business…
(NB, since Friday, I have signed up for Pownce, although I still use Twitter a lot more)
[1] The new Google Maps routing features, incidentally, are awesome… Autoroute, my standard directions application before the Internet got good, never had drag-and-drop re-routing.
A much-reduced Team Supernova was at SLUK 07 this weekend and managed to get SLorpedo finished off - complete with torpedos, explosions, and sinking subs.
We just presented our team’s hack for HackDay in London…
An awesome team effort inspired and led by Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley. A mixed reality naval game from the Supernova team.
Here’s the science part.
The real world part(s) of the hack involved a DV cam feeding Nigel’s G4 iBook with a live feed of some pieces which represented two teams, “crabs” and “sharks” (cut from O’Reilly postcards). The camera rig – managed by Jon Hadley – was a highly technical setup involving gaffer tape and a borrowed tripod – thanks to Twitter! The iBook then used the TUIO protocol to update the coordinates of the game pieces to a web server.
The second RL part of the hack was my MacBook Pro rigged with Quicktime Broadcaster and Darwin Streaming Server, pointing at the game board. This provided a video feed that could be used within Second Life. This was technically challenging to set up due to issues connecting between the laptops on the BTOpenZone network… so someone donated us an Airport hub (again following a Twittered plea for help), and I shared my connection with Jim Purbrick who was then able to tunnel through to Second Life, as well as seeing my Quicktime stream. We experimented with a cheap USB webcam too, but the iSight just worked a lot better (positioning was “interesting” though!)
Meanwhile… in Second Life, the team of Jim Purbrick, Ben Hardill, Chris Mahoney and James Taylor built an amazing setup. We had a floating blimp (on Arcanum, the sim that Linden Lab had donated for the Hack Day event). The blimp contained a table which showed the live video feed of the game being played in real life. Below that, the sim was submerged. During the demo, Babbage Linden showed off the live feed, and then flew under the blimp. When he hit the floating buoy, a group of submarines were rezzed in that corresponded with the movement of the pieces in real life. Oh, and the subs were named after names found via the Yahoo! Answers API.
We didn’t quite have time to sort out the audio, but there were supposed to be some sonar noises as the subs were rezzed. Pretty easy to add, but we got moved around a couple of times prior to the demo, and had to disassemble our rig each time.
Oh, and as a complete aside – it is interesting to see the distribution of hardware and operating systems at the event. I’d say Macs dominate, Windows are probably second (I’ve only seen one running Vista but there may be more), and there are quite a few people running Linux too. Almost all of the demos and presentations seem to be run from Macs. W00t!
I had a spot on stage earlier in the afternoon as the “glamorous” helper for the MyBlogBunny hack, holding the Nabaztag – thanks Lance
[ edit 19/06 - links and photos added, minor edits ]
[ edit 21/06 - added some more links to interesting Flickr photos ]
It’s a love-it-or-hate-it feature, but voice chatting is coming to Second Life.
Alerted by some twitterings, I downloaded the beta voice client. Algernon Spackler and I met up on the Beta Grid to give the voice support a try. I found a small group gathered at Space Port Alpha. Initially I couldn’t hear anything… but having disabled and reenabled the new voice chat preferences, it all sprang into life.
Users who are speaking have a little coloured voice print above their heads. The sound system is spatially-aware, so if you move out of an area people sound further away (the same applies if you zoom out with your camera, incidentally), and people with surround-sound capability in their headsets should get an idea of where other avatars are standing in relation to them.
It all seemed remarkably smooth, although people seemed quite quiet, shy and less ready to talk all at once, which is what tends to happen with text chat. The group I was in was only around 10 people – I think that more were present at the NMC sim and I’m not sure how smoothly the system went over there.
We did have a conversation about how many people would react strongly against this… one member of the group suggested that a large number of people on the main grid will prefer the anonymity of text chat. I guess over time it may become less easy for people to say “no, I don’t want to voice chat, I don’t have a headset”, and perhaps people will become more cautious about interacting with other avatars.
There’s an option to only have your microphone enabled when a certain key is pressed, so that you don’t have to worry that any little noise will be transmitted to the grid… as a Mac user, I found this a bit awkward – the available keys to toggle this were all very Windows-centric, but perhaps that will change before this goes live.
I had lunch with a couple of friends at the Hursley club house on Friday, and spent much of the time discussing Second Life. Fridays seem to have become a day for me to play the role of “totally unofficial metaverse evangelist-lite” - in the past fortnight I’ve spent quite a lot of the time presenting on SL on Fridays, both formally and informally. This was one of the more informal sessions, and an interesting discussion… although I’m not sure either of my colleagues were convinced.
I was pleased to hear that both Lee and Rich are readers of my blog. One thing that they said that puzzled me slightly was when they made the point that “all you ever seem to post about is SL”. OK, so after some discussion they modified this to say that I must spend a lot of my time messing around in SL - or at least that’s the impression that comes across very strongly from my writing.
It’s a fair point that my writing hasn’t consistently focused in one particular area. If anything, the blog has probably tilted towards photography and away from technical WebSphere-related topics lately. I’m very excited by the possibilities presented by virtual worlds, but I’m involved in that area strictly as a volunteer, and I don’t intend to give the impression that all I do all day is run around a 3D environment getting excited by virtual musicians. My day job as a WebSphere consultant is my primary focus.
I’d already noticed that I hadn’t been posting quite so much about my day-to-day activities or the technologies I work with, so I’ll try to do some more of that. However, the tagline of the blog says it all, as does the About page - there is still going to be a mixture of topics to read about.
Had a couple of days of Second Life-related activity.
I spent yesterday in the company of the exceptionally cool Roo Reynolds, one of IBM’s Metaverse Evangelists. It was great to learn more about our thinking in terms of virtual worlds… and I even introduced him to Mugshot and Windows Live Writer, so I like to think I had an impact on his life, too.
Today, I helped a colleague present on virtual worlds and Eightbar to an internal audience in London; and this afternoon I gave my own presentation to another internal group in Canada. Both experiences were very enjoyable – there’s a wow factor when you move from presenting a set of slides, to zooming around a three dimensional space, to showing off some of the stuff that we’ve been building on the IBM Island Complex.
… and on the day I can’t make use of my normal connectivity, comes the news I’ve been waiting to talk about!
Ed Brill is the first blogger I’ve found who mentions one of the major Lotusphere 2007 announcements: Lotus Connections. This is a culmination of a lot of the work we’ve been doing internally around collaborative “Web 2.0″ tools such as blogs, social bookmarking, and social networks (I talked about it briefly before, in a post about Ventura).
The International Herald Tribune likens the release to MySpace for corporations. Some people might feel that MySpace is a bit frivolous, and I’d agree – in my opinion, it is largely aimed at teens. However, the technology and trends that it (and other social networking sites) represents are enormously important to business, and several of us have been evangelising this message for some time now. When I’ve talked about it with colleagues, I’ve sometimes encountered the reaction “where’s the value?” or “surely this is all going to eat into my time…” – both perfectly valid points, but I think they are answered quite straightforwardly.
A recent BBC News report mentioned that over half of American teenagers were familiar with social networking sites. The next generation of workers are already beginning to absorb these technologies into their lifestyles. Businesses can now start to build these kinds of networks internally, and there is real value in doing so.
If you’re not sure about the power of these kinds of tools within a company, witness my own blogging network. To pick individuals from my blogroll at random, without having an internal blogging platform, I simply would never have communicated with people such as Ed, Per, Cesar or Dan… or worked with Hannah, Andrew, Chris, Kelly or the eightbar crowd. These tools have transformed the way that we work, and the way in which I see the world.
Incidentally, there’s a Lotusphere location in Second Life, too… again, I’m unable to go and check it out for myself right now due to connectivity issues. See Per’s post for more. I’ll be online later.
